For years administering feed additive supplements to livestock and other animals has been a common practice. These microingredient supplements have included antibiotics, enzymes, hormones, medications, minerals, proteins, vitamins, direct-fed microbials, and other nutritional supplements and medications that provide a balanced diet, protect the livestock from disease, stimulate growth, and improve feed efficiency. These supplements have been administered in both dry and liquid forms, although the feed industry is shifting more toward feeding liquid supplements and other additives to beef and dairy cattle due to problems encountered with dispensing dry ingredients.
Feed additive premixes have been used in dry form with filler materials to supplement livestock feed. These feed additives were stored in their dry, premixed form at the feedlot until use. These feed-additive premixes were then either mixed with the feed before delivery to the cattle or spread on the feed in the feed bunk. The problems with this manner of administering feed additives include high expense, difficulty in storage, and difficulty in accurate dosing. Uniform mixing with the feed ingredients is almost impossible. One factor causing this difficulty is the tendency for additives of different densities to segregate while in the premix state. This may result in some animals receiving too much of one additive and too little of another. Excess dosages of especially toxic additives can have dangerous effects on the animals. Insufficient dosages may not effectively perform their intended functions.
Another problem contributing to the difficulty in administering accurate dosages is the tendency of feed additives to breakdown physically and/or chemically. Handling and storage of the feed additives over long periods of time and in diverse environmental conditions that may exist at the feedlot adds to this breakdown.
Premixed feed additives also limit the choices of additive combinations that livestock can be fed to those combinations commercially available. They also limit the flexibility to feed different groups of animals different combinations and dosages of microingredients to meet their differing needs.
Attempts have been made at solving the foregoing problems. For example, various methods and apparatus have been developed that dispense feed additive concentrates into a fluid stream at the feedlot (see U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,733,971; 4,910,024; 5,008,821; 3,822,056; 3,720,185; 3,498,311; 3,670,923; 3,806,001; 3,437,075; 4,889,433; and 4,815,042). In many of these attempts, feed additive concentrates are stored in vats and separately delivered either by weight or by volume to a liquid carder, such as water, for dilution, dispersion, and suspension. The resulting fluid is then delivered into livestock drinking water or feed before consumption.
Although these methods may have helped overcome some of the problems inherent in dry-mix additives, they still do not adequately and efficiently meet the high standards required for administration of many microingredient feed additives. For example, live microorganisms used as feed additives. These direct-fed microbials added to cattle feed can increase nutrient absorption efficiency and help control the proliferation of harmful microorganisms in digestive tracts of animals that could adversely affect weight gain or milk production.
One example of a currently used microingredient feed additive that illustrates some of the problems involved in administering liquid feed additives is a formulation developed by the owner of the present application called Cobactin.RTM.. The microbial feed additive, Cobactin.RTM., contains the bacteria, Lactobacillus acidophilus, that works in the digestive tract of beef cattle. Data from cattle feeding trials indicate that Cobactin.RTM. increases the carcass weight of the cattle by an average of three to five percent. Cobactin.RTM. is preferably delivered to the cattle along with other feed supplements and feed ingredients.
Maintaining the viability of these bacteria at the feedlot is difficult since they are sensitive to environmental influences such as moisture, air, temperature extremes, and many chemicals. The bacteria may be appropriately packaged to greatly extend shelf life. However, the delivery of the bacteria may cause the bacteria to become labile. The appropriate dosage of the bacteria must be delivered to the feed truck according to the weight of the feed ingredient placed in the truck while maintaining the viability of Cobactin.RTM.. The application of Cobactin.RTM. must also be carefully controlled to prevent contamination.
The inherent nature of the prior devices and methods used limits their ability to reliably meet these high standards. The use of the prior methods can also be complicated in administering the feed. The systems involve so many separate pieces of equipment to deliver, mix, store, cool, and disperse the microingredients that maintenance and cleaning would be quite costly. The complication also leads to lower reliability and higher manufacturing costs and significant service costs. These high costs limit these machines to only the largest operations. They simply are not cost effective. The mixing vats and associated machines make prevention of contamination difficult at best.
Therefore, there exists a need for a microingredient additive delivery system and method that is easy to use, inexpensive to manufacture and maintain, reliable to accurately deliver small dosages without significant interruption, useful with a wide variety of animals and sizes of livestock rearing or dairy operations, and resistant to contamination. Accordingly, the present invention was developed and provides significant advantages over previous devices or methods used to deliver microingredient feed additives.